Notes and Observations: I thought this lab was really straight forward and going to be simple, but I was surprised to find the amount of skill and attention to detail that was required. It can be difficult to correctly cut the wires so they all are at the same length when they are put into the connector.

Conclusions: Even though I couldn’t fully get my cable to work I was capable of realizing my mistake and learn from it for the next attempt. If I had enough time to try it for a third time I would expect myself to be successful. As for the patch panel, I found it a cinch.

A lot of the terms that were talked about in the Networking hardware lecture I had already heard of or even knew, but overall I learned a lot and had it put all together. Combined with the OSI Model lecture I got a grasp of the different levels of Networking and what each level is about.

At the bottom there is the physical layer, where devices like repeaters and hubs send data in bits. This layer has no intelligence to it. The next layer has some intelligence where it figures out who the data is going to after an initial confirmation, and only sends it to that intended person from there on out. This layer is the Data Link layer where there are devices such as bridges and switches which have collision prevention. The next layer is even more intelligent, that being the Network layer. Here is where the router is placed, the common device used in homes. The data protocol for the routers are packets, which I have heard of before when I’ve tested my internet’s reliability and figured out there was a packet loss issue. The fourth layer is the Transport layer that acknowledges delivery. The last three are sort of grouped together; session, presentation, and application. This is where network aware programs are like HTTP and email.

This week we learned about Networking and Electricity. I enjoy physics, so I already knew a lot of the information over electricity. It did refresh my memory on them and I learnt a few new things, like that resistance is measured in Ohms.

As for Networking I did learn a lot more, like the different set ups there can be and the advantages/disadvantages. I’ve messed with different protocols before, but never really understood what they were all about until this week.

My contributions for this week were adding to my assigned page on the Wiki. I plan to expand on it some more later.

Objective:
Make a webpage to prepare for the lab reports and blogs we will be doing, contribute to the Networking Wiki, and join the Diigo group.

Conclusion:
I already had this homepage made, so that part was easy. I added some notes to my assigned topic of “What is Networking”. And finally I joined the Diigo group just like I had the Digital Media Diigo group. I’m assuming this is good enough for this intro Lab we had, it just seemed like setting everything up.